This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Meditation as Release; Gil's Story pt 2 (1 of 5) Discovering Release. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Release; Dharmette: Gil's Story pt 2 (1 of 5) - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 04, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Meditation as Release

Hello everyone, and I am happy to have this time together with you, to offer you teachings that are close to my heart, and to share this meditation time.

One of the ways of translating the very important word of Nibbana¹ or Nirvana is translating it as release. One translator translates it as unbinding. So often, Buddhism is associated with letting go, but sometimes for the English-speaking audience, that doesn't really capture the richness, the depth, and the essence of what this is about. Sometimes, I think the word release works really well.

If our hand is in a tight grip, we can release our grip. We might still hold on to what we're holding, but we release the grip. Or if we are tied up in knots—the Buddha talked about untying the knots, the releasing of the knots that bind us—or we're covered over. Something inside is covered over, and so there's an uncovering. There's a lifting of the weight, the burden that we carry, and then there's a lightening. All these things imply something really nice that happens. The release of a grip—there's a kind of ease or relaxation. The lightening of a burden—we feel lighter. Untying the knots of the mind—and the mind feels released, or free, or open.

So the emphasis here is on how we benefit from releasing whatever we're holding onto, clinging to. So maybe in this meditation, that can be the emphasis: release. Release whatever you're preoccupied with. Release whatever you're fixated on or caught in. Release the preoccupation. Release the way in which you're relating to what's happening when the relating is not free, or light, or open.

Allowing a step back into that space where there can be release. Releasing the grip on your thoughts. Releasing the resistance to what's uncomfortable. Releasing the hesitation to be honest with what's happening. Release the attempt to get away. Release the drive to acquire and attain, to make something happen. Just release. Release.

So, assuming a meditation posture, lowering the gaze, and maybe closing your eyes.

Begin with an effort to gentle. The gentling of yourself within. A gentle calming. A calm gentling of the heart. Relaxing as you exhale.

Letting your attention roam around your body. Relaxing the body as you exhale.

On the exhale, relaxing the thinking mind. Softening the mind. Softening the edges of the mind.

And then centering yourself on the breathing. Letting the physical sensations of breathing be an invitation to feel your body more fully, to feel how your body experiences breathing.

Tuning into the rhythm of the body breathing in and out. The rhythm of the torso expanding and contracting.

And then gently, without a lot of effort, a gentle effort as you inhale, let there be a release. Release of your thoughts, your tensions, the grip in the mind, in the heart. Not a full release, but just a gentle opening. Maybe as the torso expands with the inhale, things are allowed to release outwards, float away, open up.

And then a gentle release on the exhale as well. Release from the torso, a releasing of things: the mind, thoughts, feelings, the grip, the holding, the resistance. Any ways that you can let things on the exhale just wash off, slide off, relax.

And letting there be a rhythm of release on the inhale, release on the exhale. Maybe slightly different movements of release with each one. Not being ambitious, just loosening the edges, softening. Incremental movements of releasing where there's tension, contraction, holding, preoccupation, or congestion in the mind.

For these few minutes we have, release even what you don't want to let go of, at least for these few minutes. Release with every breath.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, there is a release that allows a more open attunement, receptivity, and presence for other people. Release of being guarded, or holding onto resentments or fears.

At least for these couple of minutes during this meditation, in the quiet and peace sitting here, to release whatever blocks your heart, so you can gaze upon the world with goodwill. So that you can make a connection between your meditation and wishing others well, between the ways in which you let go, relax, open up in meditation, and how it makes you a better person to relate to others.

And in that better way, to give expression to your goodwill with the following words:

May all people be happy. May all people be safe. May all people be peaceful. May all people be free.

And may we stay close to a heart that wishes this for others and contributes to the possibility. Thank you.

Dharmette: Gil's Story pt 2 (1 of 5)

Hello and welcome to this Monday, when we begin another five days of talks. I thought I would finish my life story in relationship to Buddhism last week. I kind of thought that was plenty of time, but there's still some more to talk about.

So we ended up on Friday with my decision to go to Burma to follow up with my first experiences with Vipassanā² in Thailand, and that it took a while to get the visa. Burma had been—they didn't know this—but was closed to any foreign, or at least Western, travel until about maybe June or so. I was able to get there in September. I was there for eight months at a meditation monastery. In those eight months, I was at the headquarters of what's called the Mahasi Meditation movement. It was probably the biggest Theravada³ Buddhist meditation movement of the last century. A monk named Mahasi Sayadaw⁴ formulated a way of practicing Vipassanā that was very effective for many people, and it spread very quickly. When I was there, there were maybe 300 centers of this practice in Myanmar, and it had spread first to Sri Lanka and then to Thailand. Then it came to the United States. One of the initial people who really got it established here was Joseph Goldstein, along with Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Jacqueline Schwartz. They had come out of that scene in Asia and came and started teaching it here.

So I went to the headquarters, the source of it all. There was a very large monastery, kind of like a community college campus with some 5,000 people meditating there at a given time, spread around the complex. It was to do intensive meditation. We were supposed to get something like four hours of sleep at night, and otherwise, practicing throughout the day. We had two meals a day, breakfast and lunch. Most days there was a meeting with the abbot for about 10 minutes, and most days he gave a Dharma talk around 4:00 in the afternoon. Otherwise, I practiced mostly during those eight months in my smallish room. It was big enough to have two beds in it, and I had one that I slept and meditated on. I often did walking meditation in the room, sometimes outside in the hallway.

It was, I would say, one of the most wonderful times of my life. I had a lot of joy and happiness, and just delight to be doing the practice. I came there out of my Zen practice, having—you know, I was still a Zen priest—and I had this idea that I was going to continue with my Zen practice, which I defined to myself as an unconditional acceptance of the present moment, but that I was going to learn to do it better. I was going to follow the instructions of meditation teacher U Pandita Sayadaw⁵ in order to do that unconditional acceptance. What I had learned from doing Vipassanā practice is that my unconditional acceptance of the present moment that I learned to do in Zen was very meaningful for me, very helpful, and I'd learned to be pretty settled, calm, peaceful, and resilient in my life, but it was only in the macro moments, in the larger scale of things. What I learned through Vipassanā is in the micro moments, the small in-between everything or underneath in a deeper layer, there was a lot of non-acceptance going on—a lot of wanting, resisting, not wanting, judging, criticalness. It was very much deeper. So the surface issues of my life had kind of been settled in a very important way, but there were still deeper roots, deeper activation there that I wasn't often aware of. But in the Vipassanā practice, the more careful moment-to-moment attention and the deeper concentration, I could see it was still operating.

So I was going to follow the instructions very carefully in order to do this unconditional acceptance. This was extremely important for me because the teacher, U Pandita, was very much like a little bit of a general. He wanted us to strive. He wanted us to try hard, try harder, try harder, stay up all night. He was always kind of pushing us to strive. Some Westerners under his tutelage crashed. It was really difficult for some people whose Western psychology somehow didn't match very well with the striving effort that he was often pushing for. But I didn't buy into it. I had this resiliency and this acceptance that I had from Zen that I did together with the careful attention that he wanted us to have.

So it worked for me fairly well. In the beginning, the first two months I was there, I did put in more effort than I usually would in Zen. It was a little bit maybe because U Pandita was so demanding, you kind of say, "Okay, I'm going to really try to practice here." We had to run an account every day we saw him of how much sitting meditation and walking meditation we had done in the last 24 hours. We had to kind of sum it all up. He would hear—we had to be honest, right? So we had to report how much we were practicing alone in our rooms, and if it wasn't enough, his eyebrow would go up. Having this fierce general's eyebrow go up was enough to make us think, "We don't want to do that again." And so I would sit and walk much of the day, as much as I could. I would never do laundry on the days I was going to see him. Once a week we had a day off from seeing him, and that was the day that I would do my laundry and do a few other cleaning things so that I didn't report less time for meditation.

So I practiced along, and I was happy to practice, but then this amazing, wonderful thing happened: he left for Australia for two months to teach a retreat there. As soon as he left, I was poised in a nice way, I think. I wasn't conscious of this, but something in me relaxed. I had the momentum, and then I relaxed and let go, and settled into a much deeper place of well-being, of peace, that was really wonderful. That became the entry point for me to go deeper into Vipassanā. I had experiences of release and freedom that I'd never had before in my life that were life-changing for me, teaching me how deep release can be. I had a sense of peace, a sense of the value of letting go, a sense of clarity, and a lot of things from before practice. But it felt like I reached the deepest possibility of that in my experiences there under those eight months of practicing.

I didn't realize it at the time, but over time I came to realize that this was life-changing. At some point, I decided to continue doing the practice. I wanted to practice with Western teachers where I could make sure that I had good communication, rather than through a translator. Also, I found that we didn't eat anything after noon, and I found that it didn't quite work for me—that I would do better if I could have just a little bit of a snack in the late afternoon or early evening to sustain me. I was very thin. I think I weighed 140 pounds, and so I had no reserves to manage to get through the evening. So I came back to America, and I was going to go to IMS (Insight Meditation Society)⁶, but at some point I felt too weary to go. I was signed up to go, but I felt something inside of me, some deep weariness. I didn't identify what it was, but I said, "No, I'm not ready to go." And so by then I was back at the San Francisco Zen Center, and I was asked to take a leadership position there in the meditation hall as the meditation hall manager for the year. Since I wasn't going to IMS and I had nothing else to do—I was a Zen priest and I had no other life plans—I felt very lucky to be able to spend another year back at Zen Center practicing there. That was a nice integration practice for me from this intensity of being so full-on in Burma to then being in a community and in a monastery.

During that time, there was a man who had been at Burma with me. He had been a monk, and he came to see me at Green Gulch. In the conversation with him, I reviewed and talked about what had happened to me in Burma. I realized that the way I practiced, I had overemphasized concentration, and I didn't realize that. U Pandita tried to tell me that, but the way he told me I couldn't understand what to do with it. The amazing thing happened when I realized this in talking to my friend: immediately that weariness evaporated. Immediately I said, "Okay, now I'm ready to continue at IMS."

So then I went in the fall of 1987 to do a three-month retreat at IMS, studying with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, to continue the practice. That was also quite wonderful for me to do. It had different challenges than I had before, but it was really wonderful. In the process of doing that, I had similar kinds of deep releases as I had in Burma, that clarified for me an understanding of this possibility of what the work was about. Now I felt like, "Now I understand that this is the practice; at the essence of it is this deep release of all holding, all clinging."

But what I learned at IMS, which I hadn't learned before in Vipassanā, was I learned about goodwill. I learned about mettā⁷. The teachers there—they didn't do this in Asia, but the teachers in America included guided mettā meditation as part of the three-month retreat. As a Zen student, that was too artificial, or too sweet, or too inauthentic to do these kinds of phrases and stuff about mettā. So I tuned out the teachers when they did the guided meditation, until in these deeper releases that I was having in practice, mettā arose. And then I said, "Oh, that's what they're talking about." And then I had something as a foundation for the practice of mettā and living from that mettā-full place. While I did Zen practice, I was compassionate. Doing Vipassanā, I was mettā-ed, I was good-willed. I don't know if these two different movements were inherent with the practice that I was doing or whether it was really the phases of my life, because in Zen I was really contending with a lot of my suffering, a lot of the conventional suffering of my life. In doing Vipassanā, there was not much suffering. There was a lot of physical pain at times when I was at IMS, but not a lot of suffering. There was a lot of joy, a lot of happiness, and it was kind of being softened and softened in a very different way than I had been in Zen or during that Zen time. In that, there awoke in me this mettā, kindness, and friendliness, and that became the orientation around my practice.

Leaving IMS very much had to do with this release, this deep freedom, and this mettā, this warmth that came out of it. That seems like a good place to leave off, because then I came back to California, to Zen Center, wondering what to do next. I'd spent almost 10 years in almost monastic life, wondering what to do next, and that will be where I pick up tomorrow. Thank you.